Quick Look: The Castle Doctrine

I'll be sure to pick this up when it goes on sale :P

This game sounded really neat from hearing about it on the bombcast.

I've always had the opinion that the best home defense is the shotgun + dog combo.

Haha! =D

On the bomb cast this kinda sounded like Clash of Clans.

@beachthunder: Oh, you

The rate at which you die along with the time it takes to set up a house seems really annoying.

Is there someone strange in your neighborhood? Who you gonna call? Vinco. !

I was just too emotionally rattled to watch this Quick Look!

A game that sounds and seems far, far more interesting than it is to actually play, imo.

From the guy complaining that sales were bad because people were only buying his games on sale...

@sarumarine said:

Yeah, not being able to save layouts makes this seem tedious as fuuuuuck.

It's not as clever the second time around.

Who cares? Judge the game for what it is, not that bullshit.

That said, I think this game looks pretty tedious. Some cool ideas, but from what I've seen of the game (this QL, mainly), I think it looks like it'll get boring pretty fast.

So it plays kinda like a roguelike with user generated dungeons? I can easily see this end up becoming a game where people make just optimal trial and error layouts, where the robber has to basically guess the solution or else he'd wind up dead. It's interesting, but I'm not sure if that will be fun.

From the WIKI: "Any tools not used during a robbery are abandoned. If the player dies while robbing a house, any tools left in their backpack go into the house's vault."

Maybe I'm just a super bad problem solver but It just seems like it would be far too easy to make a house that you can only really do if you know how the house works

Vinny's first design seemed kinda bulletproof (without the use of tools) and absolutely zero fun to try to crack...

I think it would be cool if the added like, ovens and TV's and normal household stuff. But your wife or kids could shove a man's head into the stove to defend the home. That'd be pretty cool.

Am I wrong in thinking that most of these user-made puzzles will be impossible? You get one try, lose lots of progress if you die - and they only need to be able to solve their own puzzle once. Imagine how ridiculous and specific most of those rooms would be.

While not impossible in the literal sense - surely a puzzle is impossible if there is only one route you can take and win, that you can't possibly know about.

Oh yeah, there is only going to be one super specific solution, and it will most likely be super complex. I can't imagine this game being fun in any capacity.

Another crazy and cool aspect of this game is that he includes the full source code and put it in the public domain. And he basically tells you that while you could build a cheating custom client, to be nice and please don't cheat!

So, you only get one shot to solve a puzzle that only the creator could know the solution to? And when you fail you lose all progress? And you can't save house layouts for future houses?

Doesn't sound like much fun :(

Not to mention it'll take 5 seconds to die and 15 to 30 minutes to build your house every time.

anyone else fed up with bad looking indy games? Just because you are an indy developer does not mean you should invest almost no time in graphics or design of a game. But these days it is mostly all retro and done.,,,,,

Have you considered maybe it wasn't a choice but a necessity? This game was developed by a single person, if he could afford an artist, I'm sure he would have.

i came here to post this. you beat me to it.

This game looks tedious as fuck. I can easily imagine a set-up where the only way to win is through randomly guessing the right door or trap, so you're constantly spending time resetting your own roulette just to go out and spin the gun chamber again, praying for a *click.* I hope this gets streamlined before release.

@deadpanjazman: This is where the tools play a major role. I built a house that over 60 people have visited and which has killed 23. The guy who finally stole the nearly $17k brought in a full backpack of tools and cut the wall leading to the safe, bypassing the actual puzzle. Another thing is destruction of your house. After your wife is killed, any damage a player has done during that robbery is permanent. So in my case, many of my dogs were put to sleep and batteries and electric grates fried, removing a lot of the difficulty in getting to the safe.

I want to be Johnathan. Taylor. Thomas. Hmmm, right off the bat I see one thing that should be changed to make the game more fair: I don't think you should be able to move your safe. It's placed randomly and bolted to the floor.

If that's true then that is just plain dumb. It's like he wants to drive people away, then probably complain in another article later how shitty people are for ruining his game with rampant cheating.

That seems like it would kill any attempts at fun whatsoever. A roguelike where every room is a death trap with one and only one solution that requires you to remake your character after every death and has no "save designs" function.

Maybe I haven't seen enough but it seems like complete guesswork.

"My Wife!" - BORAT

Losing so much work after trying to robe a house is to much of a punishment.

Especially when learn the rules of the robbing. So stupid that you cant step over a drugged dog.

I heard Vinny sometimes does a little house improvement but I had no idea how hard it really was. I look forward to watching this.

Imagine if this guy would have gone the F2P route and allowed you to spend real money on the tools to break into other people's houses. OK, I feel a little better about his "My friends should not be millionaires because they put their games on sale and the people who bought them may never play the games" thought.

I didn't realize when people said "no animation" that they meant "NO ANIMATION".

Guess this game is all sound no fury.

Just tried it out ... house building seems very cumbersome and once you're done you die :D I just checked the WIKI again for some tips and the trap guide is crazy. http://thecastledoctrine.gamepedia.com/Traps_Guide Looks like you don't actually need to rob other people to get money. Just build a house that kills intruders and sell their stuff. I want to like the game but it doesn't really seem appealing after reading up on it.

This looks like the opposite of fun

Seems like the novelty would wear off pretty fast. If you have a super successful house like the duder with $320000, you're almost better off NOT playing the game! Let's say you go to someone else's house and die... Welp there goes your progress, better luck next time!

Man, I imagine there would be people who would buy them too if he did that, just to take down the highest house. The developer seems alright, he even did a really cool contest that ended two days ago where you would win real money based on how much ingame money you had in your house.

I am, in an academic sense, impressed by a lot of the design of this game, but it looks like no kind of fun and I have zero interest in playing it. Also the visual design is absolutely awful.

For me, a lot of the time the fun, especially if you are focused on building a house over robbing others', is from trying to make an impenetrable house. When you watch over the tapes, it is really rewarding to see people get stumped on your puzzle that you worked so hard on and was finally able to complete without killing yourself in the process. Then, just as you think you no one can beat it, someone approaches it completely differently, causing you to have to rethink and tweak your design, which keeps you engaged. I encourage you to stick with it for a couple hours and focus on either robbing or building, I think you'll find it pays off.

Robbing seems like such an inefficient way to get money vs building though, so it seems like the natural tendency would be for everyone to just build houses and never rob, which would basically ruin the game in the long run. Why invest time in your house if its going to disappear, and why rob if it takes so long to rebuild?

Really interesting stuff, but it doesn't look fun to me, at all.

volumes so low!

WHAT?! The main character is MALE?! This game is so fucking disgusting I have nothing but contempt for it and it's creator.

@beachthunder: Wait, this is a joke, right :>?